


Pollice Compresso

by 35grams (caxxe)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Emperor and Gladiator, Gladiators, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-21
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-08-10 02:46:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7827373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caxxe/pseuds/35grams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Men have died on their feet for far less.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pollice Compresso

 

When his feet first touched the arena sands, the crowd jeered. When they left smearing the earth with another's blood and not a drop of his own, they cheered.

When the same man won four consecutive contests, they roared.

Weight class restrictions were lifted. The man was given larger prey. The people demanded death. Any other man would bow to the will of thirty thousand barking throats. He denied them. His opponents lost blood, lost limbs, lost spirit. He claimed fingers, claimed egos, claimed reputations, but he allowed them, every last one of them, their beating hearts. They didn't belong to him. They weren't demanded of him.

The emperor didn't demand them of him. He demanded none at all. Others took. Other men and women held them in their hands aloft as if presenting the emperor with a bauble, a gift. How the people cheered. How they roared. To think this was the same animal that now cheered this champion. The emperor had never known his people to tire of bloodlust, had never imagined it to be just another trend that had run its course the moment this man greeted their eyes, the moment he first ended a match with a single swing at his foe's heels, this man who played at once a dancer and a surgeon, a demon and a saint.

Every trend ends.

Now, however, the people were delighted when, at the swift conclusion of his fifth successful bout with a brute as tall as two of him and nearly as broad, the champion remained in the arena when before he would all but charge inside to scrub the contest, the earth, the other man, from his skin, gone even before the first cheer erupted from some distant throat.

But he remained, and for the first time in all his contests, maybe in all his life, he raised his head to peer into the stands, and the emperor couldn't see his eyes from the shadows cast by the winding snakes of his damp, reddened hair and by the cruelty of distance, but he knew as surely as he knew the sun would rise and set and burn that the champion's eyes chased none but his own.

That same sun blinded him as the people's champion twisted his blade just so to catch in the emperor's eye, the rest of him still but for his still-heaving chest, unmarred but by the winds' playful lashes and a bright sheen of sweat. The emperor canted his head. The champion tilted the blade.

Men have died on their feet for far less, yet still the champion flicked the blade as his opponent hobbled out, still his mouth remained parted though he'd long since caught his breath, shining red from the first blood ever spilled in that arena that belonged to him: scarlet beads dragged out of the flushed lip of the empire's newest toy by his own impatient teeth.

The emperor beckoned an attendant to arrange the meeting this man so dearly wanted. When his eyes returned to the arena, the champion had gone.

 

 


End file.
